Waiting for Healing

Moving beyond the promise that “everything will be okay”

Joni Eareckson Tada

If you spend any time at all with me, you will know that I love the old hymns. I love to hear them, and I love to sing them. But for me, it’s something more than nostalgia or enjoying a particular style of music.

I don’t just sing hymns because I want to. I sing because I have to.

Waiting for Jesus

I remember darker days when I was first injured and in the hospital. I wanted so much to cry—and to just go on crying for the rest of my life. Instead, I would stifle the tears and comfort myself with one of the old hymns of the church:

Savior, Savior,

Hear my humble cry;

While on others Thou art calling,

Do not pass me by.

When I sang those words, or even hummed the melody softly to myself late at night in my hospital room, it always reminded me of the pool of Bethesda in . When friends visited me at the hospital, I often asked them to read that passage to me.

John speaks of one man who had been there, lying beside that pool, for 38 years. The account goes on to say that “when Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time” (verse 6, niv), he approached the disabled man and asked him a question. I can’t tell you how many nights I would picture myself there at the pool of Bethesda, on a blanket, perhaps lying next to the paralyzed man on his straw mat. In my mind’s eye we would lie there, waiting. He would be waiting for an angel to stir up the waters. Then, somehow, he would inch himself over to the pool and slip into it for supernatural healing.

Waiting for Healing

Joni Eareckson Tada is a TCW advisor, a best-selling author of more than 50 books, an internationally-known speaker, and the Founder and CEO of Joni and Friends International Disability Center. You can learn more about Joni at JoniAndFriends.org.

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